DIGITAL THERAPEUTICS
The Context: Are we really solving any pain?
The original app was conceived of as a digital monitoring tool for patients to log and track their pain to report it to physicians. It had been designed and built by an outsourced team at IBM.
They had little experience building applications for startups resulting in an expensive and dated-looking app that was also highly unusable and filled with unvalidated product assumptions. It was clear that patients weren't involved in the product development process and that the app was a collection of physician-centric opinions of the "right solution".
It was built in a vacuum for over a year with no iterative validation process and coupled with a poor understanding of what patients we're really wanting and needing.
It was time to fix that.
My Role: More Than Just A Usability Problem
An initial UX evaluation found over 60 usability-related issues, many of them being deemed critical. Worse, the solution didn’t solve problems that chronic pain patients deemed important. It was clear that too much effort had gone into building a solution nobody could use and nobody wanted.
We set about to change this by getting as close to the users as possible and understanding what they we're really trying to accomplish. It was clear that we needed to dig deep and understand what people suffering from chronic pain really go through and experience so we could envision a solution that actually helped them accomplish their goals.
The Research: Time to Turn Things Around
I lead work to better understand and align on the target personas within the larger umbrella of “chronic pain patients”. After alignment on the target persona, I began to rapidly prototype and test solutions to address the target persona's needs.
A more refined understanding of the right solution evolved after a proper analysis of the competitive landscape and primary and secondary research conducted on the target market.
Ranking chronic pain patient needs surfaced through analyzing posts on a Reddit was a major turning point in our understanding of the key issues facing patients. We felt the desire to connect with people who could relate to them was the one that could be best served through a software solution.
I created an empathy map based on primary research interviews conducted with chronic pain patients to align the team on who we we're focusing our efforts on and what goals they were trying to achieve.
The Solution: Making An Impact
While the solution evolved over a year and a half of iteration and development the core values established through the inital research remained. The mission of the company was to help people suffering from chronic pain achieve a better life by empowering them with the knowledge, support, and tools to become expert self-managers of their health.
To validate solution in advance of development I would use my design and prototyping skills to test solutions with a core group of early-adopters we had built through our social network research on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.
The completely revised product was easy to use and was instrumental in achieving both successful user engagement and business outcomes ending in a $30-million acquisition by The DNA Company.
The Journey To Recovery
One of the most interesting and impactful aspect of the new direction was created in collaboration with Alice Fleenor, a Certified Pain Management Coach, who joined the company to help us develop and deliver a virtual chronic pain management program called The Journey To Recovery. The 100% virtual pain self-management program became the cornerstone of the app and enabled us to achieve some amazing results with our initial cohort of users.
The Results: Getting Their Life Back
While the company was successfully acquired the lasting outcome for me was the impact our work had on users who went through our beta programme. Below is just one of many testimonial from people who not only learned to better manage their pain but go back to school, work and improve their quality of life.